EXIT POP QU'EST-CE QUE C'...
Exit POPQu'est-ce que c'est, la sculpture moderne? Cars.
What's POP? Urbain.
What is MO's magic? Speed.
Speed can create the cryptic eloquence of a graffiti visualized in a
gesture, or speed can signify the scenography of a cartoon with its
rapid changes in perspective. This graphic quality can itself be
animated and incorporated in the form of a clip, whose accelerated
sequentiality of pictures is both rhythmic and linguistic. The Speed
of Cars series formulates visual rap. Here too: no battles without
bullets. "Fast music" delivers the fuel for the sprint of the synaptic racing machine. Electronic music guides the synchronisation of the senses, Electro is the track and the trip. So, nothing but MTV, or what? Too late. The spirit of the machine has already realized itself: The driving automobile motion, chased by the camera, perpetuates and rises towards a Tour de Force of racing engines colliding with each other.
Similar to the city run like a machine - remote-controlled by its
users - the automobile acts following the video camera's directions.
This ambivalently contextualizing relation between the visible and
invisible, the shown and the concealed, generates the appearance of
the hermetic and autonomous - the aura - which connects the city, the camera and the car.
But in an absurd way this illusive autarky of means is permanently
perforated by MO MAGIC's omnipresent Pop-vehicles aimlessly wandering around in the cut-up of urban sets. The comic touch of their prototypical pseudonyms like Busta, Big Nose, Scraper and Dick results both from their psychedelic design, which exaggerates their figures to an artificial extent, and from their hysteric amok-running attitude.
You'll stay in its endorphine jam, spinning around in city-limit
speed: "Faster, MO, mo' POP!"
The hysteric moment in the Speed of Cars series is comparable with
the classic logic of a derailing situation in the comic strip. Mo's
trip is the cross-ride on urban stereotypes, which he tunes up to a
popular matrix; he takes a crazy detour to the roundabout of
hyper-affirmative hallucinations on an everyday-culture screened as
universal. Porte de Berlin ? Just passed it in a rush. Never mind.
Actually everything revolves anyway around sculpture - three-dimensional, four-dimensional and symbolic: cars, speed and the
city.
Richard Schuetz
artist, writer and curator, Berlin
(about the work "Porte de Berlin" 2005, video, 2.28 min, DVD, catalogue published by Revolver/ Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt as part of the yearbook 2005 Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany)